The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

Dr. Joyal came and went. Told only that Émilie had fainted, he attributed the incident to her first menstrual period. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie waited by Émilie’s bedside for her to awaken.

  “How do you feel?” Yvonne asked when Émilie opened her eyes.

  Émilie was as puzzled by their presence as the lingering sensations in her body. “I ache all over—my back, my arms, my legs—as if I’d been working hard.” She had no memory of the seizure or the commotion it had caused.

  With a single shared glance, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie decided they would not keep the secret from Émilie. They did not know much, but they told her all of it. The news thoroughly unsettled Émilie. Even her sisters’ solemn promise to take care of her could not erase the feeling that she had been invaded by something that could take control of her anytime it pleased.

  Yet Émilie decided to be braver than she felt. “As long as you’re with me, I won’t be scared,” she said. “I know nothing will happen to me.”

  Émilie’s seizures struck several times a week. An argument, or “any stormy scene from which she could not escape,” might trigger one. Even when things were pleasant she could count on at least one seizure a month, coinciding with her menstrual period. Yvonne took responsibility for watching over her sister, keeping a spoon in the drawer of the nightstand the two shared.

  “The cry coming from her bedroom, then Yvonne hurrying in to wake the rest of us—this was an accustomed part of life, too,” the others remembered.

  * * *

  —

  From the outside, everything looked fine. There were photos of a happy, united family to prove it. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie themselves told the press exactly what everyone wanted to hear. “It is lovely to have mama and daddy always near,” Yvonne said to the Toronto Star. “I am so happy. It is just like the picture books, our new house is so nice.” But the reports from the Big House, the sisters later confessed, contained “truth and falsehood almost inextricably blended.”

  Double standards ruled their lives now more than ever. Unlike their brothers and sisters, the girls were obligated to do their homework under their father’s supervision in the living room to ensure that they wouldn’t congregate privately together upstairs, away from their siblings. Anytime there was an audience, though, they were still required to be the Dionne Quintuplets. Oliva Dionne, who had spent six years watching with disgust from the upstairs window of the farmhouse as his daughters were driven “like sheep” into the observatory’s playground twice a day, suddenly took inexplicable pride in showing them off himself. For a year after their move from the nursery, tourists could watch the famed sisters—along with Daniel and Pauline—in the playground during recess hours. Their father accepted invitations for them to perform at public Victory Bond rallies to support the war effort, launch a quintet of battleships, crown the queen of North Bay’s winter carnival, and participate in the centennial celebration of the Ottawa diocese. He even allowed TV cameras into his home to film his daughters saying the rosary for a special Easter Sunday broadcast. Birthdays—including their own—and Mother’s Day were occasions for the Dionne Quintuplets to perform private concerts for their father’s guests in the basement playroom. Other times, he let the visitors peep into the girls’ bedrooms while they feigned sleep to avoid being put on display.

  * * *

  —

  As Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie matured into teenagers, their hunger to be recognized as five separate people intensified. “We were caught, it seemed, between two fires—wanting to be treated as individuals, which was not allowed, and wanting to keep together as a group united by a special bond of sympathy and understanding, one for the others.”

  Yvonne was “the strong one, the decisive one.” Though she was the most fearful, protecting her sisters would always be Yvonne’s overriding instinct. When all five of their Shirley Temple dolls disappeared soon after moving to the Big House, it was Yvonne who took it upon herself to confront Elzire. Yet Yvonne was also acutely sensitive; she had formed a deep bond with her doll and felt the loss more keenly than anyone when Elzire informed her, “You are no longer children. Those dolls are not for girls of your age.” Despite her courage, Yvonne was not one to press matters—she understood that in the Big House, peace was more valuable than victory.

  Obedience and an eager desire for her mother’s approval characterized Annette’s teenage years. Singing and dancing were her respite from the troubles in the Big House, and her innate humor and optimism gave Annette additional weapons against despair. “I would like to put light in the darkness of everybody,” she said. “I work very hard to be positive, to see beauty in a grey sky.” To sustain herself, Annette nurtured a dream of starting a family of her own. “During difficult moments, I said to myself: Endure, Annette. One day you’ll have your family. You will have them, your children.”

  Cécile’s outgoing personality masked a constant uneasiness, for she carried the weight of everyone’s troubles as though they were her own. Her resemblance to her grandmother Legros became a shield against Elzire’s anger—a shield Cécile shared with her sisters. “My mother said that I had the same eyes as her mother,” she recalled. “I used that to prevent Émilie and Marie from bad treatment. I could soften Mom, change her mind. I mostly protected them.” Her selflessness took its own toll. “I think Cécile, in the Big House, put too much on her shoulders,” Annette reflected. “She felt responsible for everything.” Even when her parents quarreled, Cécile blamed herself.

  Émilie was the most changed. In the nursery she had been an irresistible combination of mischief and piety, “the one quickest to show kindness and understanding.” As a little girl, she would climb from her crib in the wee hours of the night to soothe Yvonne and Cécile from their nightmares. Émilie was also the one who famously took pity on Mother Hubbard’s hungry dog, laying a piece of her bacon next to his picture in the nursery rhyme book. After her illness set in, Émilie’s sisters remembered, “her nature seemed to turn in on itself,” and the effort of hiding her seizures from the public transformed her from a happy-go-lucky child into “the most sober-minded” of the five.

  Marie combined the mildest exterior with the fiercest streak of rebellion. She alone dared to ride her bicycle down the road and over the hill, out of sight of the front windows, or to talk back to Oliva. She took after her mother in the kitchen, producing butterscotch cakes Elzire could be proud of. “Most of whatever happiness she knew came from Mom’s praise of her skill,” her sisters recalled. Marie never let her diminutive size hold her back and often doubled her load of chores to spare Émilie as much physical strain as possible.

  * * *

  —

  On top of the unique troubles of being a quintuplet, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were plagued by insecurities familiar to any teenage girl. The chubbiness that had made them such adorable toddlers now embarrassed them, especially when the Toronto Star printed their weights for the world to see on the occasion of their fourteenth birthday. Their mother made or chose all their clothing—all of it identical, usually in the big flower prints Elzire liked best, and always about twice as large as it needed to be. “And we were already short and big,” Cécile lamented. “We saw it in the papers, that we looked clumsy and awkward, and it was very difficult to accept.”

  They simultaneously craved and dreaded the “rare adventure” of a trip into North Bay. When they went to town to see a movie, a police escort roared up the highway along with Oliva’s car. The attention their father so enjoyed “never failed to dampen the pleasure of being allowed out of the house.” (The police dreaded it, too, and called it “Petticoat Patrol.”) Shopping was just as fraught. Five identical brunettes stood no chance of strolling North Bay’s streets unnoticed. As their father had done years before, they kept their eyes down, pretending not to notice the stares as their cheeks burned with self-c
onsciousness. “I wouldn’t be my sisters for anything,” Pauline said of their burdensome fame.

  It was not long before the teenagers wearied of pretending everything was fine. “The old newspapers contain many a story deploring the fact that the Quintuplets grew into sullen, sad-looking girls,” they observed. “We could not entirely disguise our feelings. They showed on our faces.”

  Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie had one haven: school.

  Rather than send them off to boarding schools like their elder siblings, Oliva Dionne decided to turn the former Dafoe Hospital into a private school of his own. “It was impossible to enroll the Quintuplets in a regular school,” he told the press. “This way they can continue their education as far as they wish. They will have normal companionship of girls their own age without being deprived of the home atmosphere and home protection.” And so in 1947 a dormitory was added to the girls’ beloved nursery, rechristened Villa Notre Dame.

  Though they had hoped to leave Corbeil—had even dared to imagine attending five different boarding schools—the girls thrilled at the prospect of spending five days and nights away from the place they were supposed to call home. “At the start of the school year, we left the Big House behind us and took ourselves back to the old, familiar building which, transformed as it was, represented hope and happiness.”

  Five Sisters of the Assumption were brought on as teachers, and they in turn carefully selected a class of Roman Catholic girls to become the Dionnes’ schoolmates. Connie Vachon was one of them. Her first impression of Villa Notre Dame: “Barbed wire. And a long, low building. I thought, Gosh, it looks lonely, and it looks very big.”

  At first the two groups of girls were tentative with one another. “They kept to themselves,” Connie remembered; “they were still frightened, even of us. They wouldn’t confide in us for a long, long time. We would ask them a question and they would barely answer with a yes or a no, to begin with. You had to really, really work on gaining their confidence and their trust before they would open up to you.” She did not know that Oliva had cautioned his daughters about their teachers and schoolmates the morning they left for Villa Notre Dame: “You’re smart enough to size things up. Don’t believe everything they tell you. They might try to influence you in the wrong way, turn you against your parents, try to divide our family again. If that happens, I want you to tell me right away. I’ll take care of it fast.”

  The other girls had their own adjustments to make to life at Villa Notre Dame. They didn’t know how to tell their five identical schoolmates apart, and worried about mixing them up. Jacqueline Giroux was so homesick, she cried before she even set foot on the porch steps. All the other girls seemed sad at bedtime, too. “I remember being very surprised to see girls like us who seemed to be very happy with their families,” Cécile said. “It was not like that for us.”

  Émilie took special care to ease the other girls’ homesickness, treating them to chocolates and going out of her way to make sure none of them felt inferior because of her sisters’ fame. Her epilepsy came as a particular shock to her new schoolmates. “It surprised me at first because I was not told that she had seizures,” remembered Simone Boileau. “No one was,” said Connie Vachon. “And we weren’t to tell anyone, either.”

  Once the ice was broken, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie reveled in their new companions. Hearing the ordinary details of other girls’ everyday lives felt as fascinating and exotic as encountering an undiscovered civilization. “They would ask us questions like, Do you have dates? Do you have a boyfriend? What do you mean, ‘go and have a soda’? So we had to explain everything you do, as a teenager,” said Connie Vachon, still wide-eyed at the memory. Something as simple as going to a movie with friends was almost beyond their ability to imagine.

  “We hung on every word they said,” the sisters recalled, “storing it away like five goblins hoarding gold.”

  The other girls had questions for them, too. “Didn’t it bother you that people were watching you?” Jacqueline Giroux asked Annette one day when they wandered into the old observation gallery. Jacqueline had visited Quintland when she was six years old. At the time, she had envied the five little girls in their identical yellow dresses. They looked so happy, she had wanted to play with them. Now, standing inside the enclosure herself, it seemed to Jacqueline that they must have felt like prisoners.

  It wasn’t like that at all, Annette tried to explain. They had grown up being looked at; if you didn’t know any different, the spectators were perfectly natural. “We were happy,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  To their unending delight, the Mother Superior endowed Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie with nicknames they would use among themselves for the rest of their lives as “a kind of bond, a badge of the ‘club,’ and a token of individuality, if that is possible.” Marie, always the smallest, was dubbed “Peewee.” Émilie was shortened to “Em” and Cécile to “Cis.” Yvonne became “Ivy” and Annette “Netta.” For once, the five sisters felt as though they belonged.

  “It was a state of affairs Dad could not allow to continue,” they soberly observed.

  Watching his daughters give the affection he and Elzire craved to teachers and schoolmates could only have pained Oliva. “Morally, those people are taking you farther and farther from your parents,” he told his daughters at the end of their first year at Villa Notre Dame. “They are there to divide our family once again.” His solution was for Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie to return to the Big House for their meals, and at bedtime. “For the second time, we were bundled off to the Big House, reluctantly, with heavy hearts,” the girls recalled. Cécile enlisted Pauline to convince their father to make one concession: Émilie, whose epilepsy was exacerbated by the tension at home, would be allowed to spend her nights at Villa Notre Dame.

  All five of them knew it was best for Émilie, yet the nightly separation tested the very limits of their tolerance for being apart. For as long as they could remember, they had seen the world and everyone in it as if through a five-sided prism, uniting every perception into a single shared experience. Being apart, even briefly, required that they “learn a new way to live.”

  * * *

  —

  Little though they spoke of life at home, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s unhappiness was apparent to the residents at Villa Notre Dame. Teachers and pupils alike had had glimpses that hinted of something amiss behind the Big House gate. The nuns had experienced Oliva’s suspicion for themselves, and saw the way Elzire’s mood could pivot in an instant. Occasionally their classmates pitched in to help with the chores on weekends, experiencing the sisters’ workload firsthand.

  Some of the other girls sensed there was more to the sisters’ gloom than housework or the loneliness of sleeping and eating apart. From time to time, Jacqueline Giroux remembered, one of the Dionne girls appeared troubled by something, and the five of them would silently unite, bolstering one another. “But what the problem was I never knew,” Jacqueline said. “I never knew. I couldn’t guess, and I never asked any questions.”

  “Many times I felt there was a subtle strangeness,” Connie Vachon reflected, “but I didn’t know what it was.”

  * * *

  —

  Strangeness was a word far too mild for what was happening behind the Big House gate. As Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie remembered it, their unspoken distress had an innocent beginning. Elzire was away, attending a Mother of the Year ceremony in Ottawa. All five of the girls were ill with whooping cough—one of the many childhood illnesses they suffered as teenagers as a consequence of a germ-free upbringing—so their mother had taken Thérèse and Pauline instead. In Elzire’s absence, Oliva seemed “more relaxed, not as strict, and a little less distant,” the girls recalled. When he came upon them gathered all in one room, he did not sco
ld.

  “How are my little girls?” he asked instead. “Have you taken your syrup?” The five of them detected an unaccustomed note of gentleness in his voice. “I have a surprise for you,” he added, and drew a box of chocolates from behind his back. None of them could remember their father ever giving them a treat without a photographer on hand to record it. “Keep them for yourselves,” he said. “And don’t tell anyone, especially your mother. Make sure she doesn’t find the box when she gets back from Ottawa.”

  For that one moment, sharing a secret with their father was as sweet as the candy itself.

  * * *

  —

  Later that evening, Yvonne remembered, Oliva knocked at the door of the bedroom she shared with Émilie. “Why didn’t you answer right away when I knocked?” he asked.

  Yvonne laughed. “I was swallowing my chocolate,” she said.

  Émilie offered the box to Oliva, and he ate one with a smile. “You’re still coughing,” he said. “I heard it when I was at the door.” He sat down on the edge of Yvonne’s bed. A brown bottle was in his hand. Liniment—“excellent for chest colds,” he said.

  When Yvonne reached for the bottle, Oliva said, “I’ll rub you down myself.”

  Yvonne’s cheeks flamed. She was thirteen years old. She did not want to unbutton her pajama top with her father looking on. Something in her told her to resist—something more instinctive than modesty. “Are you shy in front of your own father?” Oliva asked. “Come on, now! I only want to see you healthy.”

  Yvonne could not meet her father’s gaze as she disobeyed her instinct and did as she was told. She was as ashamed of her nakedness as of her anxiety. He didn’t realize that she was modest, Yvonne told herself. What did it say about her, she wondered, if she interpreted a gesture of goodwill and compassion as something sinister? Oliva rubbed the liniment on her neck and shoulders, then across her sternum and ribs. Let it be over quickly! Yvonne thought. Oliva poured more liniment from the bottle and moved his palms lower.